Python: download a file from an FTP server

I’m trying to download some public data files. I screenscrape to get the links to the files, which all look something like this:

ftp://ftp.cdc.gov/pub/Health_Statistics/NCHS/nhanes/2001-2002/L28POC_B.xpt

I can’t find any documentation on the Requests library website.

Answers:

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Method 1

requests library doesn’t support ftp links.

To download a file from FTP server you could:

import urllib 

urllib.urlretrieve('ftp://server/path/to/file', 'file')
# if you need to pass credentials:
#   urllib.urlretrieve('ftp://username:<a href="https://getridbug.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="2e5e4f5d5d59415c4a6e5d4b5c584b5c">[email protected]</a>/path/to/file', 'file')

Or:

import shutil
import urllib2
from contextlib import closing

with closing(urllib2.urlopen('ftp://server/path/to/file')) as r:
    with open('file', 'wb') as f:
        shutil.copyfileobj(r, f)

Python3:

import shutil
import urllib.request as request
from contextlib import closing

with closing(request.urlopen('ftp://server/path/to/file')) as r:
    with open('file', 'wb') as f:
        shutil.copyfileobj(r, f)

Method 2

You Can Try this

import ftplib

path = 'pub/Health_Statistics/NCHS/nhanes/2001-2002/'
filename = 'L28POC_B.xpt'

ftp = ftplib.FTP("Server IP") 
ftp.login("UserName", "Password") 
ftp.cwd(path)
ftp.retrbinary("RETR " + filename, open(filename, 'wb').write)
ftp.quit()

Method 3

Try using the wget library for python. You can find the documentation for it here.

import wget
link = 'ftp://example.com/foo.txt'
wget.download(link)

Method 4

Use urllib2. For more specifics, check out this example from doc.python.org:

Here’s a snippet from the tutorial that may help

import urllib2

req = urllib2.Request('ftp://example.com')
response = urllib2.urlopen(req)
the_page = response.read()

Method 5

    import os
    import ftplib
    from contextlib import closing

    with closing(ftplib.FTP()) as ftp:
        try:
            ftp.connect(host, port, 30*5) #5 mins timeout
            ftp.login(login, passwd)
            ftp.set_pasv(True)
            with open(local_filename, 'w+b') as f:
                res = ftp.retrbinary('RETR %s' % orig_filename, f.write)

                if not res.startswith('226 Transfer complete'):
                    print('Downloaded of file {0} is not compile.'.format(orig_filename))
                    os.remove(local_filename)
                    return None

            return local_filename

        except:
                print('Error during download from FTP')

Method 6

As several folks have noted, requests doesn’t support FTP but Python has other libraries that do. If you want to keep using the requests library, there is a requests-ftp package that adds FTP capability to requests. I’ve used this library a little and it does work. The docs are full of warnings about code quality though. As of 0.2.0 the docs say “This library was cowboyed together in about 4 hours of total work, has no tests, and relies on a few ugly hacks”.

import requests, requests_ftp
requests_ftp.monkeypatch_session()
response = requests.get('ftp://example.com/foo.txt')

Method 7

If you want to take advantage of recent Python versions’ async features, you can use aioftp (from the same family of libraries and developers as the more popular aiohttp library). Here is a code example taken from their client tutorial:

client = aioftp.Client()
await client.connect("ftp.server.com")
await client.login("user", "pass")
await client.download("tmp/test.py", "foo.py", write_into=True)

Method 8

urllib2.urlopen handles ftp links.

Method 9

urlretrieve is not work for me, and the official document said that They might become deprecated at some point in the future.

import shutil 
from urllib.request import URLopener
opener = URLopener()
url = 'ftp://ftp_domain/path/to/the/file'
store_path = 'path//to//your//local//storage'
with opener.open(url) as remote_file, open(store_path, 'wb') as local_file:
    shutil.copyfileobj(remote_file, local_file)

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0